Jumper

This game was created as a practice of AndEngine (Open Source Android Game Engine). The book “Learning AndEngine” by Packt Publishing teaches this game engine developing a Doodle Jump clone. My intention is to share this game and my experience with this book.

[ Game Instructions ]

1) Just go as high as you can.

2) Use platforms to jump.

3) Avoid those black bugs.

[ AndEngine ] www.andengine.org

Let’s be honest here, I love it. AndEngine is really good.

Game Development is hard. You need to learn a lot of stuff and AndEngine seems to be perfect as starting point. All you need is to know JAVA.

I would strongly recommend anyone who interested in learning Game Development to try AndEngine first. It is so simple, well structured and there exist classes for everything (Sprites, Tiled Sprites, Animated Sprites, Parallax Background, Extensions for Physics, Etc) and that makes your life easier because the framework does the heavy work for you. You will be able to create your first game easily (and avoid frustration).

Not everything is good about AndEngine. It is no longer under development (no updates since 2013). Also, this game engine has enough performance for simple games but if you are going to create complex games (with hundreds of sprites or FXs at the same time) you will notice a big impact on your FPS. It might not be an issue with new Android Phones but you must take it as a serious issue if you plan to support older devices with limited resources (RAM/CPU/GPU).

Many developers avoid AndEngine because it works only on Android but if you don’t care about that. You should know that this can be an advantage in some cases because you can use the whole Android SDK directly. It is not that easy from multiplatform engines like LibGDX or Cocos2D-X.

[ Learning AndEngine ] 9/10

https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/learning-andengine

This book is Amazing just buy it now! The author explains everything really well, and he uses a nice object approach (and best practices) in every chapter of this book. I like the use of patterns (singleton & factory) to create reusable and optimized code.

You will be able to create your own game quickly after you finish this book. How do I know that? Because I did, check it out:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app_dev_coders.jumping_goat

[ Jumper game ]

It is a basic jumping game, well designed and polished. It uses Sprites (simple, tiled and animated), physics + collision detection, particle system, parallax backgrounds, Sound + Music and more. Most of the components are reusable.

It saves the highest score & preferences using SharedPreferences from Android SDK.

All the graphics are available at:

http://opengameart.org/users/kenney

You can get the source code if you provide your email at “Packt Publishing” web site. The link is above.

There is an “Official version” of this game available if you want to check it out:

http://www.appjenny.com/Android/App/is.kul.learningandengine.official